Irish Politics

Following the controversy over the banning of this Lent's Trocaire ad as 'political' by the BCI, (See, Eoin O'Dell, E. McGarr, VoteTube for details) I thought I'd republish this essay from the McGarr Solicitors site. The short answer is no, by the way.

The news this evening is full of the announcement of the publishing of the wording for the new amendment to the Constitution. I use this inelegant formulation because no publishing yet appears to have occurred, though there has been plenty of announcement.

You could be forgiven for thinking that we'd forgotten all about the VoteTube competition we announced a while ago, amongst all this talk of newspapers. Don't worry, we're not quite as inactive as it looks on that front, and there may be a big bang coming on it this week, or next.

Mediocre to poor Ministers don't write their own speeches. They read the speeches written for them by their civil servants as amended by their political advisors. The Fianna Fail Ard Fheis is on this week.

According to figures given out by Michael McDowell last week in a Parliamentary Question regarding FOI requests, 41% more people were being charged a €15 application fee by the Department of Justice in 2006 than in 2004.